Leftovers

• Science

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ The High Cost of Quantum Randomness Is Dropping

    After years of uncertainty, two researchers posted a paper last October that proved that it is in fact possible to construct such a circuit. Their work provides an elegant and secure way to represent quantum randomness that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, without the enormous computational load — though it’s only possible in a world where some basic theoretical assumptions of cryptography are correct. The proof could open new doors for quantum computing and cryptography research.

  • Fabian Beuke ☛ Profunctor Optics: Monoidal Structures for Modular Access Patterns

    Profunctor optics are a modern, category-theoretic generalization of optics – bidirectional data accessors used to focus on and update parts of a data structure. Classic examples of optics include lenses (for product types like records/tuples) and prisms (for sum types like variants or unions). Profunctor optics unify these and other optic flavors (such as isomorphisms and traversals) under a single abstract framework. This unification rests on principles from category theory: in particular, profunctors and their algebraic structure. By leveraging profunctors, we can compose different optics seamlessly and treat all of them within one formalism, overcoming limitations of earlier concrete representations. In what follows, we delve into the theoretical foundations of profunctor optics, explain how they generalize lenses and prisms, and discuss their implications for functional programming design.

• Career/Education

  • NDTV ☛ "F-1 Visa Revoked": Why US Is Asking Hundreds Of International Students To Self-Deport

    Hundreds of international students studying in the US have received emails from the US Department of State (DOS), telling them to self-deport as their F-1 visas (student visas) have been revoked owing to campus activism. The crackdown is not limited to students who physically participated in campus activism, but people who shared or even liked 'anti-national' posts have reportedly also been targeted in these emails.

  • ARRL ☛ An Interview with ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA

    A 2-hour interview with ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA, is available on The DX Mentor Podcast, hosted by Bill Salyers, AJ8B. Minster was elected by the ARRL Board of Directors as CEO in 2020, and has led the association’s operations since.

  • [Old] Sophie Koonin ☛ This page is under construction - localghost

    If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan community colleges want to lure male students. Bass fishing anyone?

    Despite efforts in recent years to increase tuition-free access to higher education, women outnumber men at community colleges, universities and – most visibly – in the Michigan Reconnect Program, where enrollment is 2-1 women to men.

  • Deseret Media ☛ HB265 is now law: Utah colleges begin implementing budget reallocation processes

    On Wednesday, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed into law HB265 — the controversial "strategic reinvestment" legislation requiring the state's eight public colleges and universities to reallocate millions to programs determined to be of highest value.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Russia completes development of 30-year-old outdated lithography tool

    The ZNTC lithography tool — which was officially introduced a year ago — is a 200-mm litho machine based on a solid-state laser with an exposure field size of 22mm × 22mm (484 mm^2). ZNTC and Planar do not disclose critical technical details about the tool, including the wavelength of the laser it uses or the power that the laser can emit. However, it says it uses an energy-efficient 'solid-state' laser with a 'tighter' emission range and longer operational life.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ First Time Typewriter Purchases with Specific Recommendations for Writers

    I regularly see writers (or their friends or significant others considering buying them presents) interested in purchasing their first typewriter as a (distraction-free) writing tool. Naturally, unless they grew up with them or have other direct experience, the primary questions are: how much are they?, which ones are the better professional tools?, and where can they get them?

  • Irish Examiner ☛ Meet the men who rescued hundreds of historic Irish clocks from disappearing abroad

    Their team of dedicated staff and volunteers share the unenviable task of changing the time on more than 600 clocks.

    Everything including grandfather clocks, marine clocks and turret clocks, among other attractions at the museum will go forward by an hour this weekend. While some of us will undoubtedly lament the hour lost in bed, others will celebrate the start of summer and the onset of longer evenings.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ An Ode To The Game Boy Advance

    In March 2001, Nintendo introduced an advanced portable model to the gaming market with the release of the Game Boy Advance (GBA, codenamed Advanced Game Boy or AGB). Equipped with a modernized 32-bit ARM CPU running at twice the speed of the Game Boy Color (GBC), this small device was more than capable of playing SNES-like games—still at the price of only two AA batteries.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • US News And World Report ☛ Plastics Are Seeping Into Farm Fields, Food and Eventually Human Bodies. Can They Be Stopped?

    Around the world, plastics find their way into farm fields. Climate change makes agricultural plastic, already a necessity for many crops, even more unavoidable for some farmers. Meanwhile, research continues to show that itty-bitty microplastics alter ecosystems and end up in human bodies. Scientists, farmers and consumers all worry about how that's affecting human health, and many seek solutions. But industry experts say it’s difficult to know where plastic ends up or get rid of it completely, even with the best intentions of reuse and recycling programs.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Bananas are in danger. Could Spain’s Canary Islands save them?

    “Tropical crops, such as bananas, grow more slowly and are less productive [here] than in tropical places,” says Antonio Marrero, associate professor of agricultural and environmental engineering at the University of La Laguna in San Cristóbal de La Laguna, Spain. “But, in exchange, many of the diseases of tropical places are absent in the Canary Islands.”

• Proprietary

  • Mandaris Moore ☛ Why Would Developers Care 2025?

    Is this release going to make development of good to great software easier or is this another chance to navigate more services into our lives?

  • Brian Callahan ☛ GCC 14.2.0 on PowerPC Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

    LLVM dropped support for PowerPC/Darwin a long time ago. But GCC still supports it. But I read somewhere that the GCC people only support Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on PowerPC. Thankfully, I've never let people smarter than me get in the way of my bad ideas. We're going to ignore them and get a native GCC 14.2.0 for Tiger.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Daniel Miller ☛ Comments on How Software Engineers Actually Use AI

      I’m much more concerned about the economic impacts of the current AI bubble. I lived through the first dot-com bubble, and I was too young and too early in my career to appreciate its broader impacts (even though it led to the loss of my first job in the software business). The amount of capital currently being poured into what is essentially an unproven technology — at least from the perspective of proving some massive value that would justify the investment – is frankly terrifying. Cory Doctorow has written the most cogent analysis I’ve read thus far in What Kind of Bubble is AI?: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google ScreenAI: make your Chromebook melt down

      ScreenAI has a purpose that sounds reasonable. But also, what Google’s written here is a lot of of the way to Microsoft’s much-unloved Copilot+ Recall — that sends everything that happens on your Windows PC back to an AI running at Microsoft.

      At least ScreenAI doesn’t send your data back to Google — yet.

    • PC World ☛ Use this trick to beat shady 'dynamic pricing' when shopping online

      Some online stores and services have what’s called “dynamic pricing” algorithms. That means they adjust their prices for each customer on an individual basis according to various factors. Instead of being shown the best price, you’re shown a price that the algorithm thinks you’ll pay.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Studio Ghibli distributor pushes back at AI attempts to ‘replicate humanity’ as classic film returns to cinemas

      The trend has delighted fans but also highlighted ethical concerns about artificial intelligence tools trained on copyrighted creative works and what that means for the future livelihoods of human artists.

    • Variety ☛ Studio Ghibli Distributor Praises 'Princess Mononoke' Release Over OpenAI

      Hollywood actors and other creatives have voiced concerns about efforts by OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies to “weaken or eliminate” protections on copyrighted works for training AI systems. In comments filed with the Trump administration‘s Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this month, more than 400 filmmakers, actors, musicians and others objected to what they said was lobbying by OpenAI and Google “for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries.”

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Gleeful Cruelty of the White House X Account

      Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Malware is harder to find when written in obscure languages

      To better understand why certain languages resist analysis better than others, the authors examined a set of almost 400,000 Windows executables from Malware Bazaar.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • [Old] Dave Gauer ☛ Leaving GitHub - ratfactor

    I’m writing this page not to persuade, but to explain. The new 2FA requirement is just "the straw that broke the camel’s back". I’ve been ambivalent about GitHub since even before I reluctantly joined it over a decade ago.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Terence Eden ☛ How to prevent Payment Pointer fraud

      That address is a "Payment Pointer". As a user browses the web, their browser takes note of all the sites they've visited. At the end of the month, the funds in the user's digital wallet are split proportionally between the sites which have enabled WebMonetization. The user's budget is under their control and there are various technical measures to stop websites hijacking funds.

      This could be revolutionary0.

      But there are some interesting fraud angles to consider. Let me give you a couple of examples.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ 23andMe bankruptcy could expose customers' genetic data

      One of 15 million people who gave their genetic information to 23andMe, Monahan is now processing the news that the South San Francisco-based company filed for bankruptcy and is preparing to sell its trove of sensitive data. She values the connections the platform has brought her, she said, but is worried about where her genetic material could end up, echoing the concerns of other customers.

    • The Record ☛ Report: Personal info on federal judges is widely accessible online, leading to safety risks | The Record from Recorded Future News

      It is not difficult to track down individuals’ addresses and phone numbers, the study suggests. Researchers producing the Incogni study were able to pinpoint the data using nothing more than the name, age, city and state of the judges. Some sites had small mistakes in things like judges’ names and ages, and the researchers were able to use an algorithm to match judges in these cases.

      The findings highlight risks judges face as they increasingly are targeted by doxxing, threats and violent retaliation.

    • Techdirt ☛ Not Content With Its Billions Of Web Scrapings, Clearview Tried To Buy Millions Of Mugshots And SSNs

      Not satisfied with its 10 billion+ stack of scraped photos and personal data, Clearview turned to other companies to help it continue to build a database none of its competitors would be able to compete with. (Not that any of them wanted to compete with Clearview. In fact, other facial recognition tech companies have taken care to distance themselves from Clearview and its web scraping-based business model.)

    • Privacy International ☛ With Aid programmes in crisis, we risk more global surveillance

      As experts have cautioned, it’s not just that key humanitarian programmes are being financially impacted. It’s that aid will become more tightly linked to political interest and interference. That is, aid will flow from Country A to Country B only if Country B does what Country A wishes. In today’s world, that likely includes the receiving country using the aid to limit human rights.

    • Kansas Reflector ☛ Data privacy experts call DOGE actions 'alarming'

      Before President Donald Trump took office in January, he characterized DOGE as an advisory body, saying it would “provide advice and guidance from outside of government” in partnership with the the White House and Office of Management and Budget in order to eliminate fraud and waste from government spending.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft eliminates workaround that circumvents Microsoft account requirement during Windows 11 installation

      Last June, we reported that Microsoft had neutered a popular forced online account setup process workaround, which was as simple as inputting an invalid/blocked email account. The change did not phase us; it remained relatively quick and straightforward to sidestep Microsoft’s pushy requirement for signing in or creating an online account. Thus, hitting Shift + F10 and then typing OOBE/BYPASSNRO when facing this install issue became popular among some PC users. This era will end if and when this preview build update reaches mainstream release.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Statesman ☛ Erdoğan’s revenge 

    It’s difficult to predict what will happen next for Turkey. People are full of fear. The following day, over the course of 24 hours, the country’s leading opposition television channel, Sözcü, was shut down; Taksim metro station, a central hub of Istanbul’s transportation system, was closed; and hundreds of protesters, activists and journalists were detained in dawn raids. There is a dizzying sense that anything could happen to anyone that envelops the country. In an essay published on 28 March, Turkey’s Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk described this as the moment when Turkey’s “limited democracy is coming to an end” with the arrest of “the country’s most popular politician – the candidate who would have won a majority of votes at the next round of national elections.”

  • The Independent UK ☛ Why is Elon Musk so desperate to flip Wisconsin’s Supreme Court?

    A change in favor of the opposition could potentially loosen the GOP’s stranglehold over the lower chamber, allow the Democrats to retake the House, and, therefore, more easily thwart Trump’s legislative agenda.

  • El País ☛ Human trafficking on TikTok: Smugglers defy Trump with offers on the social media platform

    People traffickers use the network to attract migrants who are seeking to cross into the United States without documents

  • ANF News ☛ IGFM warns of Islamization and violence in Syria

    The warning was issued in response to the massacres of the Alawite community in Syria's coastal regions, in which more than 2,000 people have been killed, according to the IGFM, as well as the increasing violence against religious and ethnic minorities. “Islamization is advancing relentlessly,” said IGFM spokesman Valerio Krüger. Crosses on Christian graves are being destroyed, and during Ramadan, public eating and smoking are forbidden, and schools and public transportation are strictly segregated by gender.

  • Greece ☛ Factbox: EU ban on Russia’s LNG re-exports comes into effect

    The ban, which prohibits the reloading of Russian cargoes at EU ports for export to third countries, was imposed in June 2024, with a moratorium until March 26, 2025 for contracts signed before June 25 last year.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Turkey: Is Erdogan taking an even more authoritarian turn?

    The European Commission on Monday called on Turkey to "uphold democratic values" and the German Foreign Ministry said that political contests "must not be conducted through the courts and prisons."

    Experts say Turkey has been on the path towards autocracy for some time now. Since surviving an attempted coup in 2016, Erdogan has expanded his presidential powers and cracked down on opposition and political dissent.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s “Best Security People” Can’t Figure Out Basic Security

    Hell, you might think that the National Security Advisor, of all people, would have someone on staff whose job includes making sure his digital pants are zipped. But that would require caring about security basics in the first place.

  • [Repeat] Atlantic Council ☛ Nord Stream could divide Europe yet again

    Ultimately, regardless of how Washington decides to proceed on Nord Stream 2, Europe must take responsibility for its own decisions on whether to buy gas from the pipeline or not. In weighing that choice, it must remember three key numbers: $5 billion in additional money for the Russian military; 1.5 percent of additional profitability for German industry over its EU neighbors; and 100 million Europeans left vulnerable to renewed Russian aggression.

  • JURIST ☛ US Supreme Court upholds federal regulation on "ghost guns"

    Justice Gorsuch delivered the court’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Jackson. The court held that the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) covers some weapon parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers.

    The court found that “ghost guns” fit within the definition of a “weapon,” stating: [...]

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Dissenter ☛ Trump Administration Is Using The 'State Secrets Privilege' Just As It Was Intended

  • Wired ☛ Top Trump Officials’ Passwords and Personal Phone Numbers Discovered Online

    But the whole affair that’s dubiously been dubbed “SignalGate” isn’t about Signal at all: Experts say officials shouldn’t invite untrusted contacts into sensitive chats and should only use authorized devices, platforms, and procedures when discussing top-secret military operations. In other words, the people who set up the chat made numerous mistakes, and they had nothing to do with how secure Signal is. In fact, Signal has seen its biggest-ever spike in US downloads as a result of the news.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Atlantic ☛ We Study Repression in Turkey. Now We See It Here.

    Why was Rumeysa Ozturk seized like this? The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization.” But it provided no further details, much less concrete evidence. Asked about her detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained, “If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” In the absence of actual charges, Ozturk’s purported crime appears to be an op-ed she co-wrote in March 2024. The article called on Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” A prominent pro-Israel website featuring Ozturk’s photo later provided a link to that article as evidence of her “anti-Israeli activism.”

  • Nick Heer ☛ Elon Musk Gives Himself a Handshake

    This feels like it has to be part of some kind of financial crime, right? Like, I am sure it is not; I am sure this is just a normal thing businesses do that only feels criminal, like how they move money around the world to avoid taxes.

  • Dave Gauer ☛ I'm an American software developer and the "broligarchs" don't speak for me - ratfactor

    (Aside: On that last item, Microsoft has to take the cake. Everything it owns from Windows to Github now pushes unwanted 'AI' tools into your face. They’re even pushing this stuff on children! Microsoft has become one giant advertising mechanism for Copilot because they’ve blown unthinkable amounts of money on the gamble that this will be the next money-printing machine of endless growth if only they can get people dependent on it, lock them in, and then start turning the screws on the subscription prices. No vampire was ever as thirsty. Their behavior is so outrageous that only deep lock-in on a personal and corporate level can explain why people put up with it.)

    It’s hard to celebrate tech when the Web has been completely overrun with 'AI'-generated slop. The quality of search results has gone off a cliff. It’s disgusting and even though it was predicted, it’s still shocking how fast it happened. And on top of that, Google has intentionally destroyed their search engine for the purpose of serving more advertisements and even more generated slop, often semi-digested from other crap-spewing machine-generated sites. If you’re getting a little nauseated at this point, you’re getting it.

    Ed Zitron’s Never Forgive Them (wheresyoured.at), goes to cathartic length to describe just a fraction of the everyday miseries perpetuated by modern big tech.

    I’m telling you, it doesn’t have to be this way.

    I know it can be better because I’m living it.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Big Ag Is Blaming High Egg Prices on Cage-Free Laws

      Large egg farmers as well as Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary are blaming egg shortages and high prices in part on state-level regulations that prohibit crates and cages for chickens. The Department of Agriculture’s own data contradicts this story.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Musk simps spread fake story about their hero saving sick kid with brain chip, get busted by Snopes

      Now that Snopes has revealed both the story and photo were AI-generated hogwash, let's predict the three absolutely inevitable responses: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Yesterday's 'golden age' turns into today's mess

    So you’re saying citizens don’t want to speak freely out of fear of what the government will say or do to them? Well, I guess unless you’re Elon Musk…although he is the government now and he gets to lay down punishments how he sees fit. Good stuff…

  • BIA Net ☛ Where is Pikachu?

    It is the lighter side to free expression away from the dogma they perceive in the country. Other incidents are a demonstrator as a whirling dervish in front of the police, water cannoned, or someone doing a Christiano Ronaldo celebration or groups doing press-ups. All this points to different more light headed fun-loving and different Turkey to the one they experience day to day. They (peaceful demonstrators) are of course demonised by certain sections as, in not so many words, unturkish.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Turkey: Hundreds of thousands join growing Istanbul protest

    Imamoglu's March 19 arrest on corruption charges has sparked one of the biggest street demonstrations against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The opposition figure is believed to be the only Turkish politician capable of challenging Erdogan in a presidential election.

  • New York Times ☛ Trump’s Not-So-Subtle Purpose in Fighting Big Law Firms

    This has been happening for more than 200 years. But the barrage of at least 150 lawsuits against the second Trump administration, challenging many of its policies and personnel decisions, is perhaps unmatched in U.S. history. And in dozens of cases, judges have ordered the administration to pause or reverse actions at the heart of President Trump’s agenda.

    Mr. Trump and his administration’s lawyers are fighting in court, but they are also pursuing a much more ambitious and consequential goal: deterring lawyers from suing his administration in the first place.

  • Associated Press ☛ Trump order on Smithsonian targets programs with 'improper ideology'

    The order he signed behind closed doors puts Vice President JD Vance, who serves on the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, in charge of overseeing efforts to “remove improper ideology” from all areas of the institution, including its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.

  • The Daily Beast ☛ ‘MAGA Junkie’ Fired in DOGE Cuts Now Regrets Voting for Trump: ‘I Expected Better’

    Her woes have not stopped. Pigott, who has spoken to the national press about the issue before, has been targeted by vandals and has even received death threats since speaking out.

  • JURIST ☛ Algeria sentences elderly writer to 5 years imprisonment for undermining state integrity

    Last week, during a court hearing before the investigating judge of the third chamber, Sansal responded to charges stemming from his writings and public statements. He reaffirmed his loyalty to Algeria, declaring: “I am Algerian, I love my country, and my patriotism is beyond question.” He argued that his publications were merely an exercise of his right to free expression, as guaranteed to every Algerian citizen, and insisted that he never intended for his statements to be perceived as a threat to state security. During the same hearing, prosecutors requested a 10-year prison sentence and a fine of one million dinars against him.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • ANF News ☛ Swedish journalist Joakim Medin arrested in Turkey

    Medin had traveled to Turkey on Thursday to report on the mass protests against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He was arrested upon his arrival in Istanbul. According to the official Anadolu news agency, the journalist is accused of insulting Erdoğan and being a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ US cuts force Radio Free Asia subsidiary Whynot to go dark

    Veteran Hong Kong journalist Justin is a freelance editor at Whynot, a Chinese-language online media outlet and a subsidiary of the US government-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA).

  • [Repeat] RFERL ☛ RFE/RL Continues Lawsuit As It Awaits Funds; Judge Blocks Dismantling Of VOA

    On March 26, USAGM wrote to RFE/RL saying that it was reversing the announcement but that this was “without prejudice to USAGM’s authority to terminate the grant.”

    RFE/RL’s lawsuit maintains that USAGM does not have this authority, since the grant was awarded by an act of Congress.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish journalist held on arrival in Turkey jailed, employer says

    Medin was held when he landed in Turkey where he was going to cover anti-government protests, Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said on social media, adding that she and her colleagues "always take it seriously when journalists are detained".

  • ANF News ☛ Journalist Çiçek: Our colleagues were arrested for exposing state torture

    All of these colleagues are journalists who work at an international level. They are well-known professionals who have received numerous awards for their work. But the real aim was to conceal the torture, to keep it out of public view, and to suppress the people’s reaction. That is why eleven of our fellow journalists were arrested. They tried to silence the voice of truth, but the voice of journalists cannot be silenced through arrests."

  • ANF News ☛ Two journalists taken into custody

    It was reported that many homes were raided in Ankara and many people, including students, were detained.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s FCC Starts Harassing Public Broadcasters With Bogus Investigations

    Two, the ad-engagement model results in companies that are generally truth averse. They’re afraid of upsetting sources, advertisers, ad-clicking readership, and event sponsors, so they tend to sand all the rough edges off their journalism out of fear the truth (or responses to the truth) might impact overall engagement.

    Both combined result in a sort of pseudo-journalistic mush that traffics in feckless “he said, she said” false equivalency journalism and has trouble accurately informing readers of the truth. This, in turn, is easily exploited by corporations, authoritarians and white supremacists, whose shitty, unpopular views tend to be sanitized and normalized by the weak-kneed corporate press.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Most employees at US Institute of Peace mass-fired via late-night email

    The emails, sent to personal accounts because most staff members had lost access to the organization’s system, began going out about 9pm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal.

  • The Nation ☛ Donald Trump Is Shuttering a Little-Known Labor-Management Agency That Supports Collective Bargaining

    The latest case in point? Apparently not satisfied with trying to kneecap several independent federal agencies that regulate corporate America—the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Trade Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and more—through illegally firing Democratic members of these expert bodies, Trump is now trying to eliminate an important but little-known independent labor agency altogether. And so far he appears to be succeeding—to the detriment of companies, workers, and unions that depend on the agency’s services to reach agreements and resolve disputes.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Trump Just Ripped Up Federal Workers’ Union Contracts

    The administration is invoking an arcane provision in the Civil Service Reform Act claiming that collective bargaining rights can be terminated in instances where unions pose a national security threat. The administration’s sudden reliance on this never-before-used rule — coming at the crescendo of open conflict with federal employee unions — suggests the national security justification is merely a convenient pretext for a strong-arm tactic in a broader power struggle against the federal workforce.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Trump’s war on immigrants is the cancellation of free society

    As the United States slides into totalitarianism, there’s not much that anyone can say in a blog post that will prevent the worst. But if it is, at least, to stand as a warning to other societies that want to retain such freedom as they have, then we had better notice that the casual assumption that a neat quasi-natural divide can be drawn between citizens and immigrants isn’t limited to the US, it is the routine unthinking blather of politicians in Europe and elswhere, and not just on the extreme right. And if and when the bad times come and the immigrants get targeted, that will harm not just the direct objects of xenophobic policies but also all of the individuals who live lives entwined with theirs, some of whom will doubtless find their own status reclassified.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Google is moving on from smoke detectors and smart locks

    Google has just announced that it’s discontinuing the 10-year-old Nest Protect and the 7-year-old Nest x Yale lock. Both of those products will continue to work, and—for now—they remain on sale at the Google Store, complete with discounts until supplies run out.

  • The Verge ☛ Google discontinues Nest Protect smoke alarm and Nest x Yale door lock

    Google says the Nest Protect will continue to receive security updates and work as expected through its expiration dates (10 years from the date of manufacture for second-gen models). The alarm is still available to buy at the Google store and other retailers “while supplies last.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Google pays $100M to settle class-action lawsuit over advertising practices

  The litigation began in March 2011 when a user sued Google over AdWords, the advertising service now known as Google Ads. The service allows companies to display promotions in the company’s search engine and third-party websites. The case revolved around two AdWords features that were available from the start of 2004 through December 13, 2012.

• Reuters ☛ Google to pay $100 million to settle advertisers' class action

  According to court papers, the case took a long time as the parties produced extensive evidence, including more than 910,000 pages of documents and multiple terabytes of click data from Google, and participated in six mediation sessions before four different mediators.

• Android Police ☛ I don't think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore

  Over the past month, I've been faced with more than a dozen memorable search flops brought to me by Google. It started out in February, when the Buffalo Sabres — my hometown team and, unfortunately, one of the worst performing in all of the NHL — had taken a 3-2 lead after two scoreless periods against the similarly-struggling Anaheim Ducks. I rushed to Google for an update, only to find… nothing. Google knew the game was happening, but it wouldn’t show the live score. Even searching "Sabres score" just pulled up standings.

• Copyrights

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Who is Hayao Miyazaki? Ghibli co-founder's rant against ‘utterly disgusted’ AI animation goes viral

    Thousands of people utilized OpenAI's picture generator in the GPT‑4o model to generate Studio Ghibli-inspired art on social media. However, critics and admirers of the renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki have voiced their displeasure of the trend and copyright issues.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Judge Confirms LaLiga's Right to Block Cloudflare in Pursuit of IPTV Pirates

    Last December, a Spanish judge authorized LaLiga to block Cloudflare's shared IP addresses to combat piracy. Thousands of innocent internet users were affected, prompting Cloudflare and cybersecurity group RootedCon to ask the court to overturn the order. A judge has now denied both requests, stating that no evidence was presented to show that blocking caused any damage.